These comments are responses
to the questions listed below,
which were generated in regard to the Myron Orfield Interview of 10-05-2012.

OVERVIEW

Charter schools have often promised
innovative solutions to the problems that plague the public school
system. Myron Orfield argues that charter schools in the Twin Cities'
have aggravated racial segregation, while failing to deliver academic
improvements for students. Orfield provides several proposals reducing
this segregation and enhancing the quality of education received by
students in Twin Cities' public schools.

Response Summary:
Readers have been asked to rate, on a scale of (0) most disagreement,
to (5) neutral, to (10) most agreement, the following points discussed
by Myron Orfield. Average response
ratings shown below are simply the mean of all readers’ zero-to-ten
responses to the ideas proposed and should not be considered an
accurate reflection of a scientifically structured poll.

2. Charters must
obey civil rights laws. (6.9
average response) Charter schools
should be required to comply with the same civil rights laws as
districted public schools.

3. Close poorly
performing charters. (4.8
average response) Any charter
school that underperforms its districted public school peers for more
than two years should be closed.

4. Integrate Twin
City and suburban schools. (4.6
average response) Minnesota could
do a better job of educating students in Twin Cities’ area
(particularly in the core cities) at lower cost

by integrating
Minneapolis and Saint Paul schools with those of suburban communities.

5. Don't impose
new restrictions. (5.6
average response) Charter schools
are public schools operating separately from traditional public school
districts. They are free to innovate to a degree not possible in
traditional district schools and may introduce valuable educational
advances. Don't impose new restrictions on them despite some
unanticipated negative results.

Response
Distribution:

Strongly
disagree

Moderately
disagree

Neutral

Moderately
agree

Strongly agree

Total
Responses

1. Charters'
outcomes unsuccessful, harmful.

22%

15%

22%

26%

15%

27

2. Charters
must obey civil rights laws.

12%

8%

23%

12%

46%

26

3. Close
poorly performing charters.

19%

19%

22%

30%

11%

27

4. Integrate
Twin City and suburban schools.

15%

27%

31%

19%

8%

26

5. Don't
impose new restrictions.

11%

30%

15%

19%

26%

27

Individual
Responses:

Dave
Broden (7.5) (10) (2.5) (2.5) (10)

1. Charters'
outcomes unsuccessful, harmful.
Myron made a case that this is evolving--while not the intent it may
be the result in some instances and requires a rigorous evaluation and
guideline adjustment to ensure realistic integration.

2. Charters must
obey civil rights laws.
Only common sense

3. Close poorly
performing charters.
“Underperforms” is very vague term and while bad schools need to
assessed and likely closed, the factors for underperformance must be
addressed. Determine the cause and whether improvement can be made
prior to jumping to a conclusion.

4. Integrate Twin
City and suburban schools.
Myron did make a case to consider this approach --further study is
required.

5. Don't impose
new restrictions.
Innovation must be encouraged and enabled.

Ray
Ayotte (5) (7.5) (5) (5) (10)

Scott Haltead (5) (10) (10) (10) (0)

5. Don't impose
new restrictions.
In my limited experience, students attending charter schools generally
have had lower test scores than public schools. There also has been
poor financial management at a number of charter schools. We need to
consider other alternatives.

K.
Gogins (7.5) (10) (5) (0) (2.5)

Karen Seashore (2.5) (2.5) (2.5) (2.5) (5)

1. Charters'
outcomes unsuccessful, harmful.
This is a two-part question, which is always problematic in survey
research. I don't think that the data on "failure" is very robust,
given the weak measures that are being used to assess "success."
Self-segregation because the public schools are not providing parents
with the school climate that they want suggests that the problem
doesn't lie with charters, but with the public schools.

2. Charters must
obey civil rights laws.
Charter schools are public schools. However, they were intended to
offer alternatives. To the degree that they are constrained by any
one set of regulations that I agree with (civil rights), we close
other doors for experimentation and meeting the needs of groups that
feel that they are not well served.

3. Close poorly
performing charters.
Two years is too short a time line. Research on school improvement
suggests that between 3-5 years is needed for a new organization to
hit its stride. There should, however, be a more robust inspection
system that could pinpoint schools (of any kind) that are not
providing places that are conducive to growth and productivity for
both the students, adults, and community members supporting them.
Inspection works in other countries, and is an important supplement to
the one or two numbers that come from (weak) tests of student
knowledge in a limited number of areas.

4. Integrate Twin
City and suburban schools.
Not sure why this would be sufficiently more robust a strategy for
desegregation than open enrollment. The case is not well made.

5. Don't impose
new restrictions.
There does need to be more careful oversight. There also needs to be
publicly funded sources of support to help schools achieve their
maximum effectiveness with students.

Chris Brazelton (7.5) (7.5) (7.5) (7.5) (2.5)

5. Don't impose
new restrictions.
We must be careful not to lose a generation of children to the
experiment. Appropriate measurements and standards must be applied in
order to continue to get public funding.

choice. He
prefers that choice be eliminated and instead return to the "forced
placement" of students based on racial integration alone. I see very
little in his work that considers using student outcomes as a premise
for managing public schools. His data on performance is questionable
at best. His comment that he supports the "concept of charter schools"
is gratuitous at best. I have never heard Myron acknowledge one of the
major flaws of Brown (or Plessy v Ferguson), which is the absence of
any consideration of the quality of the education being a core
component of integration. The educational outcomes are impacted by who
is sitting next to whom (which seems to be Myron's singular factor in
whether or not school systems work), but more so by the failure of the
traditional system to change the way education is delivered. Charters
are certainly not perfect, but offer much more promise for improved
outcomes than the stagnated traditional school districts/schools.
Moreover, charters allow public policy makers to discern (if they want
to and too few do) the impact of policy decisions on what happens in
schools and to student outcomes. What happens to "districts" is
apparently worthy of attention --- but school boards and policy makers
are every bit as responsible for poor student outcomes and hardly ever
are held accountable. There is much to learn from this very simple
concept: one can be held accountable only if that person (governor,
legislator, school board member, administrator, teacher) has authority
to make necessary changes. Most importantly, the teacher has to have
authority and then be held accountable.

3. Close poorly
performing charters.
Nothing is "automatic" in public schooling. I do agree that charter
schools that consistently underperform need to be considered for
closing as one option. Merger is another. New management is another.
The burden now and properly falls on the authorizer, not MDE, to deal
with these issues. Even Myron … seemed mildly in favor of complete
restructuring (of) traditional district schools when outcomes are
persistently weak.

4. Integrate Twin
City and suburban schools.
Any strategy that results in students and parents from differing
backgrounds and experience should be considered. Choice needs to be a
part of any such strategy.

5. Don't impose
new restrictions.
MDE is over-regulating now --- but indirectly. Many of the MDE goals
of regulating charter schools have been rejected at the legislature.
But MDE goes forward anyway by requiring authorizers to add to their
oversight whatever MDE considers appropriate --- and for that there is
only one measure: whatever traditional school districts must do, so
must charters. These burdens are never tested to understand whether or
not student outcomes are improved --- which has been and continues to
be one of the biggest flaws in regulating traditional school
districts.

Don
Anderson (7.5) (10) (7.5) (2.5) (5)

David Alley (0) (5) (7.5) (2.5) (10)

Peter Hennessey (5) (5) (5) (0) (7.5)

1. Charters'
outcomes unsuccessful, harmful.
I have no idea how MN is implementing charter schools. In San
Francisco, the quality varies hugely. One in particular was so over
the top with leftist ideology that it made the regular public school
look conservative. Notice who is proposing single race schools -- the
school district. Are you telling us that the MN power elite is racist?
Segregation by race is idiotic in anybody's book, or at least should
be. On every psychometric scale people score on the statistical normal
distribution curve, a.k.a. the bell curve. Individuals vary hugely in
terms of intelligence, motivation, socioeconomic class, taste,
manners, morals, etc. It makes more sense to "segregate" students by
actual performance than anything else, so the lower performing
students won't hold back the faster learners. But people whose
egalitarian pretensions are offended by this idea seem to be finding
comfort in racism. Places such as Detroit and Cleveland (and East Los
Angeles, Compton, Watts, etc.) are failing not because of segregation
motivated by racism but because of the monumental incompetence and
stubborn misguided ideological rigidity of their political class,
whatever race they happen to be. You can't punish families for
fleeing, having fled or wanting to flee from such hell holes, by
tossing their kids into regional school district more interested in
busing than in educating them, or by forcing subsidized housing on
them. Both are misguided notions pushed by an ignorant or racist
elite. Both are just two more ways of destroying formerly functional
neighborhoods. The political leadership must take into account exactly
who -- what kind of people, in terms of their attitude toward law,
morality and common decency -- they are trying to add to the mix.
Better yet, these leaders must respect the Constitution and let people
choose where they do or do not want to live and send their kids to
school.

2. Charters must
obey civil rights laws.
What do you mean? The very notion sounds like malicious, politically
motivated slander. Charter schools ARE public schools and therefore by
definition must obey all laws.

3. Close poorly
performing charters.
Underperforms in whose judgment, by what measure? What parent would be
stupid enough to send their kids to failing schools, if they have a
choice?

4. Integrate Twin
City and suburban schools.
In the America that gave me my citizenship, we used to have freedom of
association and freedom of movement. If I as a parent choose to move
out of a rotten city to a better life in the suburbs, the last thing I
want is to throw my kids back into the sewer. Or put them on a bus for
an hour or two one way, just so some …politician can brag about
"eliminating discrimination."

5. Don't impose
new restrictions.
The point of charter schools is to free education from the
establishment's politicized and unionized bureaucracy. If there are
"unanticipated negative results," it is precisely this freedom from
unreasoned constraint that will let parents and teachers find the
appropriate remedy.

Bob
Mairs (7.5) (5) (5) (2.5) (7.5)

2. Charters must
obey civil rights laws.
Can you force schools to admit on the basis of race, ethnicity and in
what proportion?

3. Close poorly
performing charters.
What if students come in at a broad educational disadvantage? How
about comparative performance for a class progressing in the school
vs. district averages.?

4. Integrate Twin
City and suburban schools.
Sounds like scatter-shot approach, uprooting students and dealing them
out for racial ethnic mix for its own sake. And what about
transportation, after school programs, etc.?

5. Don't impose
new restrictions.
Performance counts

Anonymous (10) (10) (7.5) (5) (2.5)

Anonymous (10) (10) (10) (10) (0)

Vici
Oshiro (10) (10) (7.5) (5) (2.5)

5. Don't impose
new restrictions.
No independent knowledge; believe Orfield. Don't live in Minneapolis
or St. Paul. Believe solution lies in working more with public school
staff and increasing resources as necessary. Some of the money we
save by using robots in some industries needs to go to those parts of
our society/economy where human contact is essential.

Anonymous (0) (2.5) (0) (0) (10)

3. Close poorly
performing charters.
Only if the same is true of traditional schools that underperform as
well.

Wayne Jennings (2) (10) (5) (5) (5)

Question 5
contains three different questions that I would answer differently.
Orfield has been and continues to give statements not grounded in fact
and to comment with simple answers to complex issues. For example,
about closing charter schools based on test scores, he neglects a host
of other factors. I don’t think his ideas are well thought out.

Robert J. Brown (0) (na) (5) (na) (10)

1. Charters'
outcomes unsuccessful, harmful.
Charter schools are creating choice for poor parents, which in many
cases are creating predominantly minority schools that the parents see
as meeting the needs of their children.

2. Charters must
obey civil rights laws.
It is unclear what he means by this - what specific civil rights laws
is he referring to?

3. Close poorly
performing charters.
A new school may take more than 2 years to compensate for the poor
education the kids have received in their previous schools. But
underperforming schools should be closed whether they are charter
schools or district schools - the same standard should be applied to
all publicly funded schools.

4. Integrate Twin
City and suburban schools.
There are many options available to kids to get better education of
they and their families desire it - open enrollment, magnet schools,
charter schools, private schools, home schooling, and distance
learning schools. Where the system may be failing is not working hard
enough to see that all parents have the option to make informed
choices about what would be the best school for their children.

5. Don't impose
new restrictions.
(Chartered schools) are free to innovate to a degree not possible in
traditional district schools and may introduce valuable educational
advances. Don't impose new restrictions on them despite some
unanticipated negative results. Unlike district schools, charter
schools can and should be closed for poor performance academically or
financially.

Tom
Spitznagle (3) (5) (1) (3) (9)

Schools of any
kind should have as a primary mission the educational achievement of
their students in a manner that satisfies their customers (i.e. –
parents and their children). Customers should be free to select a
learning environment that meets their interests, educational or
otherwise. If the government forces all schools to expend limited
resources on other priorities then there will be fewer resources
available for education. Despite the vast amount of resources that we
devote to public school education, it is reported that we are falling
way behind in international measures of educational achievement.
Something is obviously not working.

Tim
McDonald (5) (0) (0) (5) (5)

1. Charters'
outcomes unsuccessful, harmful.
The term "segregation" needs to be further defined -- between de
jure segregation -- segregation caused directly by another -- and
de facto, or segregation that arises as a result of student and
family choice. They have different origins and would need different
types of responses. The term "segregation" in isolation, and as used
in this talk, implies the former -- forced segregation. I challenge
Mr. Orfield to bring greater clarity to his use of this term. It would
help clarify the debate that follows.

2. Charters must
obey civil rights laws.
Laws designed to govern one type of system should not be applied to a
different type of system uncritically. Would we say "small businesses
or sole proprietors should comply with the same laws as corporations
with more than 1,000 employees"? Constitutional rights should be
protected in both.

3. Close poorly performing charters. If a system driven by
student choices is operating effectively, than a chronically failing
school would have difficulty attracting students because they would be
fully aware of how bad the school is and that there are better
alternatives readily available. I would view it differently: The fact
that bad schools stay open means that the choice-based system is not
yet operating effectively. For example in this instance there is
little to no quality, useable information on schools -- so the
choice-based system won't operate effectively. Orfield's argument
breaks down at his assumption that the districted and chartered
sectors can and should be governed by the same processes. The solution
posed here (to close a school that's poorly performing) seeks to apply
the method of thinking about regulating one system (district bureau)
to a different system (open, choice-based). Chartered schools should
close because of a lack of students choosing to go there. That's the
question -- how to make that happen.

4. Integrate Twin City and suburban schools. This is probably a
red herring.

5. Don't impose new restrictions. (Chartered schools) are free
to innovate to a degree not possible in traditional district schools
and may introduce valuable educational advances. Don't impose new
restrictions on them despite some unanticipated negative results. The
challenge with the chartered sector appears to be less about adding
new restrictions or removing more restrictions than getting a savvy
regulatory process set up -- a process that can regulate a system
tuned to innovation. It strikes me as reasonable that we'd have an
innovation sector run along side a "traditional" or "conventional"
sector. It also seems reasonable that the method for regulating them
would be quite different. The question of how they are regulated then
is probably more critical right now than how much they are regulated.

Chuck Lutz (7) (9) (7) (9) (3)

John
Adams (4) (5) (2) (4) (8)

I worked with
Myron for several years. I do not share (or approve of) his obsession
over segregation based on race or ethnicity, which seems to me to be a
misplaced emphasis on skin color rather than on the individual kids
and their individual needs. I agree Martin Luther King's admonition
that we should pay attention to the individual person rather than to
the color of their skin. His ideology leads him to use evidence
selectively. I wish he would focus on how to improve the family lives
of kids in challenging domestic circumstances. Too many kids who
underperform in school come from deficient/destructive/disorganized
households. That's where the trouble begins. And this trouble is not
confined to kids classified as "minority".

U of M
researchers find (a) link between instability at home and low levels
of academic achievement. In a longitudinal study conducted through a
partnership of the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis Public
Schools, researchers found that students who experienced homelessness
or high mobility had chronically low levels of reading and math
achievement compared to their peers – gaps that either stayed the same
or worsened as students approached high school.

U.S. News & World
Report
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/10/30/homelessness-frequent-moves-affect-how-kids-do-in-school

I consider the
charter school movement just this side of "home-schooling" in mental
imbalance. It detracts from what should be our goal: investing more
money in our K-12 public schools, so that we can prepare our future
generations for the global competition that we are currently losing.
John Watson Milton, former State Senator

Al
Quie (0) (0) (0) (0) (9)

As a strong
supporter of all types of integration in the 1960's, here is my
present thinking. Use subsidized housing to bring about integration.
Be transparent about student progress so parents will make the choice.
Do not require new innovation in Charter schools, only student
academic progress. Integration problems in the south are not the same
as here in the north. Hauling non-white students to the suburbs has
not solved our student achievement gap problems all these years. Top
down control has not solved achievement gap problems ---- parents and
competent teachers working together have reached great success. Let’s
do what has worked in the north, not go back to a failed idea that has
been tried for 45 years as educational results have declined.

Tim
Hall (na) (na) (na) (na) (na)

I graduated from
Wayzata. There were no books on how to give a speech, write a paper,
how to study for a test. The instructions to learn Spanish in the book
were written in Spanish. We could send every student from North
Minneapolis to Wayzata, and it wouldn't make a difference. It is the
parents teaching the children. We need computers in the first grade to
give every child an equal chance at learning. I am for diversity, but
the biggest thing is to give every child an equal chance at learning
with computers. No computers, no state funding unless the school’s
religion is against them such as the Amish. I am not even sure where
they stand on computers. I have seen Amish things for sale on line.

Rosetta stone also teaches English

http://www.rosettastone.com/

Khan academy teaches math

http://www.khanacademy.org/

eyeq teaches speed reading

http://www.eyeqadvantage.com

Roger A. Wacek (0) (5) (0) (5) (10)

Kevin Edberg (9) (10) (8) (7) (3)

The interview
touched on "regulation", and those comments are accurate. The great
Achilles heel in charter schools is the absence of responsive and
responsible governance: too much insider dealing, lack of financial
oversight, etc. I'm not opposed to the concept of charter schools,
but I am opposed to how charter schools are governed, and how the
state exercises (e.g. fails to exercise) oversight.

R. C. Angevine (5) (10) (7.5) (7.5) (2.5)

5. Don't impose new restrictions. While
I generally agree with the statement I also believe that there should
be a "level playing field" and that charters should have to obey the
same set of laws that apply to public schools.

Bert LeMunyon (5) (10) (2.5) (5) (10)

1. Charters' outcomes unsuccessful, harmful.
If the home environment is not conducive to learning, it matters not
whether the kids go to public or charter schools.

3. Close poorly performing charters.
Only if the reverse is also required i.e., close underperforming
public schools as well.

4. Integrate Twin City and suburban schools.
This is detrimental to parent participation when the school is many
miles from the students' home.

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